SALMAN Rushdie's new book, Luka and the Fire of Life, is a departure, with a precedent. It is a children's book, like Haroun and the Sea of Stories, published in the immediate wake of The Satanic Verses furore and the subsequent fatwa.

The new book takes the elements of Rushdie's fiction, the weave and whirl of its magic carpet ride through the splendours and miseries of language, and presents them rapidly for a kids' market, breakneck and streamlined.

Luka is the 12-year-old son of the Shah of Blah and brings down a curse on the local woebegone circus, with the consequence that the animals desert, the tyrannical captain Aag is left ranting and Luka gets as his boon companions Dog the bear and Bear the dog, each of them now able to speak.

Meanwhile, his father is replaced in the drama by Nobodaddy (the name Blake used for God in his least appealing aspect), a very ambiguous character who seems to get stronger as Luka's real father comes closer to death. But Luka finds himself on a quest through the world of Magic Story that is also a quest to save his father's life.

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The book is a gift to Rushdie's son on his 12th birthday.

The boy hero finds himself in company with elephant-headed waterbirds who are the keepers of memory. He has dealings with a coyote who sounds like Lee Marvin and who tells him about the Wild Waste and what the eagle did to the liver of Prometheus. There's a cute Dragon called Nuthog and there's the dashing, green-eyed red-haired Soraya, who resembles his mum, is known as the Insultana of Ott and has an otter brigade and her own magic carpet that can rise above and ride into most of the horrors that govern the universe.

It's all a pretty extraordinary ragbag of questing adventures, and Rushdie punctuates the confrontations with such figures as the Egyptian god Ra, with lots of silly and diverting bits of joshing and nomenclature that should have anyone from seven to 13 giggling like a drain while the nearest adult, reading it aloud, will be thrilled to follow the references to everything from Narnia to Norse mythology.

Luka and the Fire of Life is, by design, a scrambled mouthful of a book. It's a book that makes pace into a structural principle, even as it embroiders everything with a rhetoric that is part puerile joke and part fantastical erudition.

Everything in the book tumbles and swerves into its opposite as the storyteller's quicksilver improvisations twist and turn and go haywire.

And while it is, in every sense, a slender book, it is executed, on the run, with an enormous and breathless charm.

There is something both consoling and endearing about seeing Rushdie, the great English-language inheritor of the mantle of Garcia Marquez and the magical realists, performing such a Goon Show rendition of himself, and such a Pythonesque free-for-all in the vicinity of the idea of the Hero with a Thousand Faces.

This great narrative — also a doodling story for a child and a piece of fiction not afraid to embrace the worldview of a child — is written in a wheeling and winding style that glides and glosses over everything so that the action is a nightmare of loose ends and improbabilities but for all that something sombre and splendid looks out from the fun and games.

In the end it doesn't matter that this book is the imitation of an imitation or that its cartoon childishness is like looking at Michelangelo composing a comic-strip on the fly. All that is part of the charm of Luka and the Fire of Life, which happens to be a meditation about the nature of narrative by a writer who never loses touch with the elements of shaman and charlatan in his own storyteller's nature.